When family law attorneys dedicate their careers to serving underrepresented communities, their paths often cross in meaningful ways. Abby Frost Lucha and Adrea Tencer met while working at the Family & Children's Law Center (FACLC), where they both worked to provide critical legal services to low-income families in Marin County.

Access to Justice and Equity

From your unique perspective having been a leader at Family and Children’s Law Center (FACLC) for 14 years and now serving as the Family Law Facilitator in Marin County, what are the most significant barriers that low-income families in Marin face when trying to access family law services?

The most significant barrier to low-income families is the ability to hire one’s own private attorney. However, even litigants (parents) of means choose to NOT hire an attorney (70% of family law cases have one self-represented litigant (SRL) at the beginning of the case increasing to 80% percent by the time of judgment).

The Family Law Facilitator’s Office (FLFO) and Legal Self-Help Center (LSHC) was created to reduce the barriers and increase access to the court by providing low-income litigants (all litigants) the legal information on processes that they need to navigate their family law problems. For example, if a parent needs a custody order (or a domestic violence restraining order, or both), the LSHC can provide that parent with the necessary forms; explain the steps of the process; and discuss how they can best be ready for court. While we are not able to provide direct representation, we do have staff attorneys in many of the family law calendars (self-represented litigant, law and motion, and DCSS). This allows litigants immediate access to legal services while in court.

Marin County has a reputation for affluence, yet there is significant economic diversity. How does this economic disparity impact families navigating the court system, particularly family law matters?

The legal arena and the courts are not easy to navigate. Despite best efforts, the law and legal procedure is complex and often confusing, even for legal professionals. When real life pressures such as childcare, mental health issues, mobility issues, substance related issues, financial struggles, limited English proficiency are present there can be insurmountable hurdles to meaningfully accessing the courts.

My role as Family Law Facilitator is to ensure equal access to the courts. Depending on the case and the litigants, services may look different to meet the litigant where they are. Our day-to-day can vary greatly in our effort to serve the individual with what the need that day and how to best provide those services to them in the moment. This may mean logging onto Zoom with a litigant out of state, writing an instruction letter to an incarcerated litigant trying to obtain a divorce, or meeting on the court floor with a litigant to prepare their order.

What role does the Family Law Facilitator's Office play in bridging the justice gap for self-represented litigants, and how does this complement the work of organizations like FACLC?

The court’s mission is to ensure fair and equal access to justice and serve the public with dignity and respect. To support this mission, our bench and our court administration have long supported our LSHC and the FLFO. Founded in 2003, LSHC provides no cost legal information and procedure in multiple areas of law. We have three experienced attorneys with significant family law and public interest background and two experienced court processing specialists. Over half of our team is bilingual in Spanish to ensure we provide language access (20-25% of our services are provided in Spanish). In the LSHC, we prioritize not only legal acumen but also providing respectful and courteous service to our diverse community.

When I started with the court in 2022, LSHC assisted approximately 3,800 litigants annually. The need for LSHC services continues to grow and so does the court’s ability to assist litigants. In 2025 we are on track to assist over 5,000 litigants. In addition, in 2024 LSHC answered over 12,600 telephone calls and emails from litigants.

The biggest difference between LSHC and FACLC is that LSHC is unable to provide legal advice while FACLC represents one party, oftentimes in a limited scope capacity. LSHC assists all parties in a case so long as they are self-represented. While this allows us to assist more people, the services we provide may be more limited and procedural in nature. LSHC excels in explaining various legal procedures to parties and assisting them with forms. The LSHC team also assists parties at the Self-Represented Litigant Calendar, Law and Motion family law calendars, and DCSS calendars; prepares Orders After Hearings; mediates family law cases, and per Family Code 1005(b)(1) can assume “[A]ny other responsibilities that will enable the court to be responsive to the litigants’ needs.”

Cultural Competency and Language Access

In your experience working with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) cases at FACLC, what did you learn about serving immigrant families that now informs your approach as Family Law Facilitator?

Working with immigrant families I learned that it is oftentimes not simply family law issues they may be experiencing. Families may face a whole host of other challenges, and while the court is unable to meet every need, me as the Family Law Facilitator, can be knowledgeable about our local community programs to ensure litigants have the information to get the help they need. Our team works with our community partners to keep up to speed with what services are being provided and when. LSHC creates and maintains referral lists to provide families needing additional services. Recently, this included creating an immigration services referral list in both English and Spanish.

How does the Family Law Facilitator's Office ensure language access and cultural competency when assisting Marin's diverse communities?

The two most common languages we see in LSHC/FLFO, other than English, are Spanish and Portuguese. Over half of our LSHC/FLFO staff are bilingual and one is multilingual; we provide direct assistance in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. If we have a litigant needing additional language assistance, we utilize Language Line to provide translation via telephone.

As an ongoing project, our team is working to translate our LSHC/FLFO instruction materials and form packets into Spanish. One of our most distributed packets, the DVRO packet, is now available with Spanish written instructions.

Regarding cultural competency, it is much more a commitment to cultural humility than competency. I am fortunate to work with a team that has committed themselves to public interest work and are engaged in the regular practice of self-examination. We are constantly learning and examining how we can engage in more equitable practices.

Systemic Challenges and Innovation

You've witnessed the evolution of family law services in Marin over many years. How have the needs of underserved families changed, and what systemic improvements are still needed?

In the last five years, the court has made considerable strides toward ensuring the court is accessible remotely. The pandemic spurred the digital by default movement, and created more access for litigants. For instance, the LSHC/FLFO provides Zoom/remote drop-in services two days per week; our three free mediation sessions are also remote. We literally reach people where they are: at home, at work, and in their car. In fact, we occasionally need to remind litigants joining our Zoom drop-in to pull over their vehicle, get dressed, or turn their camera off if in a state of undress or in an inappropriate location.

There may be a variety of reasons why a litigant is unable to personally visit the court in person including geography, mobility or transportation issues, lack of childcare, or employment obligations. While not an inclusive list, launching remote court appearances, creating document access through ePortal, permitting DVRO submissions through ePortal, and implementing eFiling have all been indispensable tools for SRLs to better access the court and self-help services.

Where the LSHC/FLFO and the court’s Case Management System team come in is to ensure our community and SRLs can meaningfully access these systems. Many litigants still lack the technological know-how and comfort level to interact with these systems successfully. In the LSHC, we routinely walk litigants through how to access these systems. It is always exciting when we can assist in successful utilization of an online tool that allows better access to the court.

What innovative approaches or partnerships have you seen work well in making the family court system more equitable and accessible?

We strive to maintain innovation to ensure we maintain capacity to provide dependable services to the greatest number of litigants. One such innovation this year was digitizing our intake procedure via a touch screen kiosk located in our waiting area. The kiosk not only allows parties to type via a keypad in English AND Spanish but also allows parties to access ePortal without requiring login credentials. Parties can check their court date and courtroom or see if any documents were recently filed. Utilization of this kiosk not only creates a more efficient and equitable intake process, but also it allows more enhanced access to ePortal on the court floor.

Community Resources and Collaboration

Beyond legal services, what community resources do you frequently connect families with, and how crucial are these wraparound services for achieving equitable outcomes?

We are incredibly fortunate in this county to have such a variety of resources. Looking beyond legal services (which also include Legal Aid of Marin, Bay Area Legal Aid, and the Family & Children’s Law Center), we regularly make referrals to Canal Alliance, Center for Domestic Peace, other county services such as Behavioral Health and Health & Human Services. I would encourage everyone to look at our Family Law Resource Guide located on the local forms page of the court’s website for more information on our community resources.

How can private family law attorneys better collaborate with the Facilitator's Office and organizations like FACLC to ensure no family falls through the cracks?

One of the best ways to collaborate is to understand how each entity operates. For the FLFO, we are governed by Family Code Sections 10000-10015 and provide services accordingly. However, we are also the LSHC and provide services in other areas including unlawful detainer, small claims, name and/or gender changes, guardianship, and a few others.

What LSHC/FLFO can do:

* We can assist SRL litigants with forms and legal procedures. A Substitution of Attorney or Withdrawal is required prior to us assisting a formally represented litigant.
* We provide scheduled mediation in family law cases not involving domestic violence.
* We provide court floor assistance and mediation during the family law departments law and motion calendar and DCSS calendars.
* We answer questions by email and telephone to SRLs.
* We process all family law judgments.
* We prepare Orders After Hearings for self-represented family law litigants.
* We provide judicial support as requested by our bench.

What LSHC/FLFO cannot do:

* Assist with family law discovery. It is very complicated and not geared towards SRLs.
* Provide legal advice or legal representation. This includes writing someone’s declaration for them.
* Provide assistance (outside of mediation or court) to represented parties or attorneys. There is a small exception for DCSS cases.

Private attorneys can volunteer at the thrice monthly double self-represented family law litigant calendar (held on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Tuesday of the month at 1:30pm). They can meet with SRLs to provide information on their next steps which may include (if a party is ready) finishing the judgment paperwork. Saving litigants a return to the courthouse is the most equitable things we can do.

FACLC provides sliding scale services in the family law matters in Marin. They often provide services on a limited scope basis.

When in doubt, don’t hesitate to ask!

Looking Forward

For attorneys reading this who want to contribute to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts in family law, what concrete actions would you recommend they take?

* Take on pro/low bono cases from underserved populations, volunteer at non-profit legal providers.
* Volunteer for Lawyers in the Library
* Mentor law students from diverse or traditionally unrepresented communities.
* Volunteer on the Self-Represented Litigant Calendar or as a Bench Bar Settlement Conference panelist. I would add that this would include preparing the agreement and Judgment forms for SRLs.